Design Logos with A.I. — Midjourney Guide with Real World Example

How it feels to design things with a.i.

Discovery

To begin, it is essential to understand the user and their needs. For this example, the user is the business owner who owns a website that provides dance courses called Vital Motion. They had seen traditional design work I’d done and asked if I could update their branding. We talked about using a.i. and traditional design tools before starting, and they really liked the idea.

Visual examples

This client said they had an idea for what they wanted, and sketched while explaining it to me.

Here are some doodle examples from the client:

Conceptual examples

Next, ask them what elements and concepts define their logo and brand, making sure to take note of the words and phrases they use to describe theem.

Here are some examples from this client:

i bring science into dance, ekg lines, vitals, movement and motion, dancers, free your movement, vital motion, teaching, athleticism, coaching, health, accurately

Explorations

To begin, ensure you have a free Discord and Midjourney account. You can then start generating images with artificial intelligence, or a.i.

Let’s start by testing to see how it generates basic ideas from the client for the logo.

For a list of tested prompts, I refer to this style guide I built and recently made public. Feel free to use it: https://medium.com/@ryanallen_com/ultimate-a-i-visual-style-guide-3bf20659e35c

First try

First I tried to describe the symbol the client drew a few times.

I start by prompting logo to tell the ai this will be used to identify an organization or product, then I describe the mark of letters V M in an ekg line, then I contain the mark in a circle, and finally I demand it be a simple vector shape without lots of colors.

/imagine prompt: logo, ekg line in shape of letters V M, in a circle, vector 2 color 

First results

Congratulations! This shape is simple enough for AI to interpret it without much difficulty. However, we must now focus on fine-tuning it to reach the desired results.

Second try

The first top left image is a warning, that the background might get colored. I want this on a white background, so I’ll add that to my prompt.

/imagine prompt: white background, logo, ekg line in shape of letters V M, in a circle, vector 2 color

Second results

Third try

The a.i. may not have been able to understand the prompt due to unclear wording, so I’m going to reformat the description of the mark by removing any constraints on color or vector styling. To see what the a.i. recommends, I’m also adding a request for other health-related themes.

/imagine prompt: white background, logo, theme: ekg, health, V M

Third results

I am satisfied with the whiteness of the backgrounds, and the styling of the V and M is still blending with the EKG. Therefore, I will continue to work on this prompt with a few modifications.

Final try

I want my logo to be pretty yet not overly so. Adding the word ‘clever’ to the prompt will help achieve an attractive and smart-looking design. I’m also adding ‘design’ to reference a wide range of aesthetics from flowy and organic to geometric and minimal. To ensure I achieve a minimalistic look, I’m forcing that style. Lastly, I’m referencing popular logos from Behance to ensure my logo is as stylish as possible; I’m avoiding Dribbble as adding both would be too stylistic.

/imagine prompt: white background, clever logo design, minimalistic, benance trending, theme: ekg, health, V M

Final results:

The bottom right image appears to be almost flawless! Now, I’m going to increase its size to see how it looks enlarged.

Create vector logo

Next steps involve rebuilding the image in Adobe Illustrator (or some other vector drawing program) and cleaning it up to work for different use cases / sizes / etc. This logo is too intricate to work well as a small size for example. I could cover this process in a future article — if you know of an artificial intelligence model that does a good job vectorizing raster images, let me know! Below is the final vectorized image sent to the client.

Final sent to client

Vectorized logo created in adobe illustrator (a different a.i. :) )

Response from client:

This is SUPER cool! I love the movement that is created with the white lines running through the black heart beat; it looks like a giant V or a really wide M… basically it’s everything I wanted! You are amazing!

A.I. vs final human redrawn vector logo

imagined by an a.i. and vectorized by a human